When you’re getting started in digital marketing or digital media, you’ll quickly find yourself awash in data. Figuring out which metrics to pay attention to—and which are not worth your time—can be challenging. And the truth is, there’s no one size fits all approach that works for every business. But whether you’re running digital marketing strategies for a big company or just starting your side hustle, there are two metrics you need to pay attention to know if you can actually run a profitable strategy—and they’re incredibly simple.

What are the basic digital metrics I need to know?

Before we jump into the two metrics that will tell you if your business will be successful, let’s get some basic definitions out of the way. Too often I’ve seen people in charge of big digital initiatives skip this step. Even with a track record of success in other areas, their digital business fails.

• Impression: How many times your content was displayed in people’s feeds or pages. This is a great metric for advertising and brand awareness.
• CPM: This literally stands for Cost Per Mille and it means the cost an advertiser pays for 1,000 people to see an ad.
• Unique Visitor (UV): The number of unique “people” who visit your site in a given time period. This is usually calculated by an IP address, device ID or some other unique identifier, so it’s a proxy and not an exact number. An important thing to remember about UVs is that they are time dependent and can’t be added together. So, if I visit your web site every day for a week, your daily analytics report will show me as one UV every day. But if you get a weekly report at the end of the week, you won’t see seven UVs, I’ll still just be one person.
• Pageview (PV): How many times someone loads your page. This metric can be added up.
• Video View (VV): How many people view your video. Remember, different platforms have different definitions for what actually counts as a view.
• Reach: In social media, how many accounts your content reached. There are different ways to look at reach, like unique reach, post reach or reach for a given time period, and how much it matters varies by platform.
• Engagement: There is no single definition for engagement as a metric, so start by figuring out what behavior you want to define.
• Cost Per Result: The cost you paid for a desired outcome with an online advertisement.
• Subscribers: How many people subscribe to your feed, newsletters, etc.
• Conversions: How many people you convert from one type of user to another. Like how many of your unique visitors converted to email subscribers.

These are very basic and broad definitions, but this my unofficial list of the basic metrics you need to focus on to understand your audience’s behavior. Bookmark this page if you want to keep this list on hand for quick reference.

What is eCPM?

Now we can get to our two key success metrics. The first is eCPM. Once you know what a CPM is, figuring out your eCPM is simple. eCPM stands for effective CPM. All you need to do is take the ad revenue you earned, divide it by the number of impressions you served and multiply by 1,000.

This is a metric for advertiser-funded businesses. If your main revenue source is ads, this is the metric for you. While CPM is a really important metric for advertisers to know what they’re paying for, eCPM let’s publishers figure out how much revenue the ad space actually generates. If you just figured out your eCPM and you’re not feeling encouraged about your business plan, consider this: you either need to build an audience that scales, or build a niche audience that is very attractive to advertisers.

If you’d be interested in learning more about how to do either of those things, drop a note in the comments and follow this blog.

What is ROAS?

ROAS stands for Return on Ad Spend. This also works for ad-funded businesses, but it’s particularly useful for e-comm, or any business where you’re selling something, like a product or subscription. To figure it out, you simply divide the revenue your ad campaign drives by the amount you spent.

Here’s the tricky thing to remember with ROAS. Ad costs aren’t fixed online. They often operate on an auction model, which means your cost per result can vary. A lot. Even if you know the basics, like which ad platform or platforms make the most sense for your goal and when to use contextual versus targeted ads, your price can still fluctuate simply by changing variables like bid type, or even the day of the month. So if you just calculated your ROAS and you’re not feeling good about the results, don’t give up yet. There are plenty of ways to improve this metric before giving up or going back to the drawing board.

If you’d like to know more about digital ads or best practices, sign up for my newsletter or book your free strategy session below.